(CNN) — I was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1964, the year Martin Luther King Jr. was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the Civil Rights Act was passed in the United States, and Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life in prison.
Mine was a relatively idyllic childhood in the affluent and segregated northern suburbs of Johannesburg. Like many White South Africans, I lived in an ignorant cocoon of privilege, with no idea that having two live-in maids, a full-time gardener and a driver was unusual. It was perfectly normal for my African nannies, Rosina and Phina, to live with us rather than with their own children, and there was no need to learn their language or even their last names.
It was only as a teenager that I began to realize something was horribly wrong. Phina and I were walking along the road of our pristine “Whites only” neighborhood when we saw a police van stop. Two armed White police officers got out and began interrogating the Black passers by. They roughly shoved several of them into their van, screaming obscenities all the time.
I was terrified and asked Phina what was going on. She explained that the police were on a “pass” raid, and any Black person in a White suburb without an identity book stamped with official permission to live and work in Johannesburg was a criminal and liable to arrest.
From that day on I was no longer innocent to the evils of apartheid.
A teacher in my segregated public elementary believed in schooling her privileged White students in the injustices happening all around them. Suddenly Phina and Rosina became real people to me, and I learned for the first time about Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress.
Songs like “Free Nelson Mandela” became part of our consciousness, but Mandela himself was still a mythical figure: the blanket of South African government censorship, which made it a crime to publish the words of prohibited leaders and organizations, or to write about the South African Security Forces or prison conditions, kept us in relative ignorance.
The Soweto riots happened on June 16, 1976. Police shot into huge crowds of schoolchildren of all ages protesting a directive they could not be taught in their own language. Hundreds of people were killed; the cruelty and brutality of the government’s reaction was met with rioting that spread to other townships. It was the beginning of the end of colonial, racist South Africa. The shooting death of 13-year-old Hector Peterson galvanized the world. Yet we knew little about it, even though Soweto was less than 20 miles away.
In high school, history teacher Mr. Lowry, who had been arrested several times for anti-apartheid activism, insisted we wear Black armbands every June 16th. We complied. But it was only in February 1994, in my late 20s and standing for hours in a long line of Black and White South Africans to vote in the country’s first democratic election, that I came close to truly understanding the unforgivable nature of apartheid.
We whites had lived in a place that denied people their basic human rights. Why had it taken so long to change this inhumane system? How had we allowed it? I stood in that line experiencing a mixture of jubilation and guilt. Had I really lived for 29 years in a country that had denied the majority of its people the right to vote? >>MORE<<
Izak Nieuwoudt • a year ago
the maker of this “documentary” is a ignorant, foreign- observer, documenting lies and opinions instead of truth and testimony. I live in South-Africa, and I’m shocked every day, by reports of large scale corruption in the government, and most of all the inhumane killing, in fact, geonoside of the white minority, which are being labled, by outsiders such as this, as bad people, and so doing, not only justify, but support the wipeout of an entire race. who by the way lovingly built the country they are being exterminated in from nothing.
Reminds you of nazi Germany, only this time, the killing is being supported, not condemned by the world!The ‘minority’ described in this fairy tale, is no more in control of the country’s economic resources, than the maker of this film is in control of my pet fish! >>source<< read the comments at source
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